I wish that the open source offering was of a higher quality but unfortunately it is not. When I bought Font Creator editing fonts suddenly became a whole lot easier.

Font Forge is complicated to use, it opens many independent windows on your monitors and there are many bugs. I used Font Forge for eight months before buying Font Creator. It can produce good fonts but using Font Forge is much harder work than it needs to be, oh well, at least it’s free. There is a free open source font editor called ‘ Font Forge‘ however it does have many bugs and the user interface is quite messy. But only where it provides a good usable alternative to commercial software. It’s all very subjective, but if you want a typeface which is just right for you then why not design it yourself ? Free Font EditorsĪs you may have realised from reading this blog I am a fan of free software. But I became frustrated that none of the typefaces in my collection were completely suitable for the purposes I wanted them for. There were many occasions when I would hunt through my collection of typefaces looking for the one which was just right. I believe there are many people in the situation I was in several years ago, they would like to create their own typeface if they could, or at least alter a typeface they are using to make it more suitable for them. These are the type of people who are likely to know how to use Open Type features in their documents. They usually have a large collection of fonts none of which they consider perfect. Then there are others who want their document to look just the way they want it to, they don’t want to compromise on any detail including the typeface. Most of these people ignore the excellent typefaces like Constantia, Cambria, Corbel, Candara, Calibri and Consolas which Microsoft have spent a lot of time and effort optimising for good rendering on LCD screens at small point sizes (they also work quite well in printed documents). This is why Times New Roman and Arial are so overused. There are many people who couldn’t give a damn about how their documents appear, they just want to get the message across and don’t care what it looks like.

Handwriting into font fontlab studio